The graphics in this game look far beyond PS3 and 360 capabilities. Did anybody else notice this while watching the trailer? It was obviously running on a high-end PC, and I just don't see the game looking anywhere as impressive running on the current hardware we have.

It has a brown green dominant look with average textures. The character models don't look as good as Sony's open worlder inFamous 2. Besides, it has been announced on the three current platforms so there is no need to guess.

It runs smooth though considering all that is on the screen. It's likely playing on a solid PC in the demo.

The visual aesthetic reminds me of Deus Ex: HR, although obviously the gameplay is very different. I wonder how much flexibility the game offers in terms of tactics. In the scenario shown in the demo, I presume you could wait for Joseph Demarco to enter the gallery and then fight it out there, but could you get him chasing you down the streets?

It has a brown green dominant look with average textures. The character models don't look as good as Sony's open worlder inFamous 2. Besides, it has been announced on the three current platforms so there is no need to guess.

It runs smooth though considering all that is on the screen. It's likely playing on a solid PC in the demo.

The lighting is what does it. for an open world game, this one was def running on a very high end PC. I don't see it coming to consoles anywhere close to those visuals, if at all this gen.

Being from Ubisoft, my first thought watching this demo was this looks like a high-tech, modern world Assassins Creed game--which is a good thing.
I'm probably more excited about this than any other game I saw featured at E3 thus far.

To me, this looks next gen all the way as far as consoles. This MUST have been running on a very high end PC IMO. I was extremely impressed with the graphics in the vid above. So much detail in the city, lights, etc.......No way in hell this would look anywhere near this good on PS3 or 360.

To me, this looks next gen all the way as far as consoles. This MUST have been running on a very high end PC IMO. I was extremely impressed with the graphics in the vid above. So much detail in the city, lights, etc.......No way in hell this would look anywhere near this good on PS3 or 360.

The big deal isn't so much how it looks. It's the emergent AI that Ubi is claiming will form the backbone of the experience. I'm really excited to see where this game goes in its development, but I'm also skeptical that the AI will live up to their lofty claims.

Regardless, this is far and away the game I was most surprised and impressed by at E3.

While the upcoming open-world title will be the same across all versions, senior producer Dominic Guay said the PS4 pushes all aspects of the game further.

Aiden Pearce is a highly skilled computer hacker

"I guess the image I would give [compared to PS3] is that it's like a magnifying lens," he told Digital Spy.

"Every core pillar of the game is able to be pushed further. We're able to push the immersion. The fidelity of the graphics is one part of the immersion, but it's more than graphics.

"I'll give you small examples; it's like the fidelity of the wind, how it will have everything reacting as it blows through the city, the AI reaction when something happens, every AI has to make a decision on how they'll react to it.

"We can spend more time in the brain of each AI with a more powerful machine, saying, 'OK, how will I react to what just happened there? Where will I run to? Will I call the cops?', or stuff like that.

"Fundamentally the core, innovative part of Watch Dogs is the same on every platform. But on PS4 we're able to push every lever a lot further."

Gameplay from the forthcoming 'Watch Dogs' title

Watch Dogs will use the PlayStation 4's new touch pad to control Aiden Pearce's phone in-game, something which is described as a "direct translation" and a "really cool" feature.

The studio, however, is undecided whether the game will use the light and camera positioning system.

Guay is also a fan of the controller's improvements to existing inputs - such as the analogue sticks and triggers - saying they are "a lot tighter".

"We have a game with driving, shooting, a lot of navigation, so we need tight inputs - they did a pretty good job with that," he said.

Guay also went into detail about PS4 development, saying that it's "definitely easier to get in" as a platform.

"We did fine with the PS3 at Ubisoft Montreal, but we spent more time getting through the hurdles, if you want. We spent more time getting through the first hurdles because we could get our games to look good on the platform," he said.

Hacker Aiden Pearce takes control in 'Watch Dogs'

"Now, very, very quickly we got Watch Dogs on [PS4], and it looks good, and we're happy with the performance and that's a good sign, and we're able to push the immersion level and interactivity of our game instead of trying to get things to work."

Discussing the surprise announcement of 8GB DDR5 RAM at the PS4 reveal on February 20, Guay said that it was "great" and discussed the benefits of having fast memory.

"If you have a lot of memory but it's very, very slow, it's not as useful," he said.

"[PS4 has] very fast memory. I mean, 8GB of RAM. What that means in short is that there's a lot less limit on your creators, on our artists, and details and the diversity of what they can create.

"For an open world game like Watch Dogs it also means something very important because if you have a game that happens in a small corridor, yeah, you can put a lot of detail in the corridor.

"Our game's in an open city where you can get into a very fast sports car and drive at 150 miles an hour, so typically what happens then is that you'll trade off scale or density but we don't want to do that, because in Watch Dogs you can hack anything, and if you end up in a street where there's nothing, then the game's truth kind of falls down.

'Watch Dogs' follows hacker Aiden Pearce

"We want to have a lot of density in our city, a lot of people that you can spy into, and lots of things you can do. So that's density while keeping scale, and definitely memory helps a lot with that."

Watch Dogs sees players take control of a hacker named Aiden Pearce, who has an entire city's surveillance system at his disposal, and can tap into people's electronic devices to gather intel on them and infiltrate security systems vital to the city.

It will feature innovative social features that allow users to access other players' games using smartphones.

My concern is that Watch Dogs, while touted as an open world, will end up being a cleverly masked linear game that doesn't want you to be without an active objective.

If they do it the wrong way it could end up like Rage (fun game though): The "open world" bits let you do one thing, and are just the path to the linear bits anyway. I could see WD being a string of missions without much to do, or without a way to advance, during downtime.

Or I could imagine WD wanting you to be always on a mission, pestering you with cell calls and urgent messages on your virtual HUD glasses, that there's something to be done (see GTA IV for the pestering part). Honestly, if GTA IV didn't always interrupt you I would still be playing around in that world to this day.

My idea of open world is: set me down with some tools, an objective or two, and give me lots of options. Red Dead Redemption did this well: you could blaze through the story, do every side mission but save the story for later, or just do nothing at all. I clocked over 55 hours and loved them all.

Watch Dogs, please give me an open world and let me play it my way at my pace. No constant reminders, no time pressure, no masking a super linear experience. Do all that and keep this world idea they're rollin with, and I'm in for 50hrs easy.

Ubisoft has a good record with open world games (other than AC3, of course).

And the creative director on Watch Dogs (Jonathan Morin) played a big design role in one of my favorite open world games of this gen: Far Cry 2.

I'm stoked. And, yes, as with any project this big, the cool stuff could get lost through endless focus testing and executive pressure, but Ubisoft has a better record than Rockstar when it comes to open world games IMO. And considering how much money and marketing they put behind a risky game like Assassin's Creed, they seem to be smart about letting creativity shine even in huge, gigantic, expensive, AAA games.

I'm still waiting fro open worlds to start rendering interiors. The outside sandboxes are starting to reach fidelity with the real world, but it's annoying all those pretty buildings and towers are just texture plastered blocks of digital wood.

Probably can be done due to the sheer amount of assets and time to build detailed interiors, but one can dream no?

I'm still waiting fro open worlds to start rendering interiors. The outside sandboxes are starting to reach fidelity with the real world, but it's annoying all those pretty buildings and towers are just texture plastered blocks of digital wood.

Probably can be done due to the sheer amount of assets and time to build detailed interiors, but one can dream no?

"Every core pillar of the game is able to be pushed further. We're able to push the immersion. The fidelity of the graphics is one part of the immersion, but it's more than graphics.

"I'll give you small examples; it's like the fidelity of the wind, how it will have everything reacting as it blows through the city, the AI reaction when something happens, every AI has to make a decision on how they'll react to it.

"We can spend more time in the brain of each AI with a more powerful machine, saying, 'OK, how will I react to what just happened there? Where will I run to? Will I call the cops?', or stuff like that.

My understanding -- and please correct me if I'm mistaken -- is that with previous games, the PC version may have had better graphics than the console versions, but it never had smarter NPCs. I know Borderlands 2 on the PC has fabulous animations for fluids spilling out of barrels and banners flapping in the wind that aren't present in the console version, but I believe the bad guys dodge behind cover in exactly the same way, no matter what platform you're playing on.

Based on the above quote, it sounds like the NPCs in Watch Dogs might actually behave differently between the PS3 and the PS4 (and perhaps even on high-end PCs?). If true, that would be really interesting, and might be a strong incentive to wait for the PS4 version of the game. Or am I reading too much into the quote?

Based on the above quote, it sounds like the NPCs in Watch Dogs might actually behave differently between the PS3 and the PS4 (and perhaps even on high-end PCs?). If true, that would be really interesting, and might be a strong incentive to wait for the PS4 version of the game. Or am I reading too much into the quote?

It's probably just hot air. If there were going to be that big of a difference, it would either be an entirely different game (like Wii ports of CoD), or it would never get made at all. I'm sure the differences will be the kinds of things that are on performance sliders on PC games (draw distance, resolution, visual effects, AA, population density, etc).

Kotaku has a preview. The video clips don't seem to be working at the moment, but here are some interesting bits:

Quote:

"The player can go to any of the hundreds of street corners in our city, Chicago, and if there’s a traffic light, he can hack it at any time for any purpose he has. He can do so at any time of day, in any traffic condition with any amount of pedestrians around. And when he does this, will he even cause an accident? I don’t know. It depends on the traffic condition. And if there’s an accident, the other cars will try steering away, avoiding the accident. At E3 that caused a fire—an explosion—in a nearby gas station. But it could have caused hundreds of other things. Now, some of those drivers will be knocked out, pedestrians will try to help those injured people, some pedestrians might call the cops, the cops on this street corner might try to intervene. If a fight starts there, any of those cars can be used as cover by the player or the AIs. And if the player wants to navigate across this busy intersection, you need to be able to do so in a very fluid manner even though that intersection was basically created out of his own will—his own source of action."

Quote:

Pearce's phone also has some games in it. Specifically, he's got augmented reality games. Yes, this video game has virtual augmented reality games. They're kind of just a justification for the kind of rooftop-race/score-attack type of challenges we've seen in other open-world games, I guess, but the justification is just so wonderful and executed so well, that I'm immediately a fan. The game we're shown is called NVZN ("Invasion") and has Pearce holding his phone up and, through it, seeing a Chicago that now has purple aliens floating around and attaching themselves to pedestrians, waiting to be shot for high scores. As Pearce is playing the game, a computer-controlled civilian walks by, muttering "This is not a playground."

But as well as smart interactions with AI, Watch Dogs will also include opportunities for you to interact with other human players in your single-player game. "Say you're playing alone, free-roaming," Morin explained. "There's a bunch of activities you can activate. Sometimes - and you won't know when - the objective that you have is related to what someone else is doing at the same time. When that happens we merge your reality with the other person's, and you'll be able to see them."

Morin gave the example of a mission where you had to spy on another hacker - but that person was a real player carrying out an objective within their own game who had unknowingly become part of your city. Sometimes you will be told if another player will be watching you during these objectives. Sometimes you won't.

"In playtests right now, in the scenarios where we don't tell players [they're interacting with another human-controlled character], most say 'oh this is really cool, it feels like there really are other hackers out there. Then we tell them it really was other players. And they're like 'what?!' We can have fun with your perceptions."

Well hopefully the four years of development means they actually finished this game. Which would be a first for Ubisoft.

Haha so true. I tried out AC2 and AC3, between the massive screen tearing and clunky controls I'm not sure where they spent their time. Probably to make them look pretty, because they both look great anyways.

Watch Dogs will have lots to prove if it wants my money and time. It looks promising so far and fingers crossed they do not use the AC games as a production template.

The more I see of this game the less I can wait. It looks truly amazing. I like the quasi-single/multiplayer as well. It offers some very intriguing gameplay options. I wonder though how open world it really is. I'm assuming there's some artificial barrier to me leaving the city. Regardless how cool would it be to feature a Google glasses derivative used in conjunction with the phone?